ABOUT

Introduction

Voat is unique in a number of ways, and adjusting to the website can be a challenge, let alone adjusting to the existing culture. Below are some brief answers to commonly asked questions. Be sure to consult the About and FAQ pages for more comprehensive information.

Basic Use of the Website

The most commonly asked questions tend to consider how to use the essential features of Voat, i.e. making submissions and comments, voting, sending messages, making new communities (called subverses), and what the meanings of SCP and CCP are.

SCP and CCP

SCP stands for Submission Contribution Points; CCP stands for Comment Contribution Points. Both scores are calculated based on the net number of upvotes and downvotes one's submissions and comments have received, respectively. SCP has no meaning beyond a record of how much one has submitted and how well received those submissions have been. However, CCP is very meaningful and plays a central role in Voat's functionality, so making comments and participating in discussions is essential for a fully functional user experience.

Also important to note: CCP can only be gained in public, non-anonymous subverses -- meaning subverses that show up in the /v/all feed and that do not anonymize usernames. Subverses that do not show up in /v/all are subverses that have been set to "Private" and subverses that have a "minimum CCP required to downvote" requirement. Therefore, upvotes received in such subverses will not increase CCP, and thus no progress towards being able to post submissions, send messages, or downvote posts will be made if the only subverses one uses are those that do not appear in /v/all.

Posting Comments

Nothing special is required to post a comment; just begin typing in the text box beneath the body of a submission, or hit "reply" underneath a comment you would like to respond to, and once your message is typed out, hit "Submit comment" or "Submit reply", and your comment will be there for all to see -- no SCP or CCP is required to do this. However, if you have received more downvotes on comments than upvotes, your CCP will be negative, and this will limit you to 10 comments a day. This, like most CCP requirements on Voat, exists as a deterrent to Spam and other abuses; it is not perfect, but it protects the website.

Posting Submissions

There is a requirement for posting submissions on Voat: 10 CCP is needed. This means you have to have received at least 10 upvotes on comments you have made before you can post any submissions; 10 CCP is a low number; one comment could be enough. The requirement exists to prevent thousands of bots from being made and generating submission spam immediately. Filling out a Captcha will also be necessary for the posting of a submission after 10 CCP has been required -- this requirement goes away after a certain amount of CCP has been accumulated.

Sending Messages

The same requirements apply to sending messages as apply to making submissions: 10 CCP is required and Captchas will have to be filled out early on.

Creating Communities (Subverses)

No CCP is required to create your own subverse; however, you will have to wait until your account has reached an age of at least 30 days before you can do so.

Voting

There is no requirement to be able to upvote (except for having an account!), but there is a limit to the number of times you can upvote per day. This limit ordinarily equals one half of your CCP -- so if you have 5,000 CCP, you can upvote 2,500 posts and comments in a day. However, when your CCP is below 200 and above 20, you will be limited to 100 upvotes a day, and when your CCP is below 20, you will be limited to 10 upvotes a day.

Downvoting does have a CCP requirement -- 100 CCP is needed.

It is not possible to downvote anything older than 7 days, and it is not possible to either upvote or downvote posts older than 3 months; such posts are "archived", and they cannot even be replied to.

Also worth noting: "Farming" upvotes is against Voat's rules, since it diminishes the strength of the CCP requirements, as well as their purpose. Therefore, any posts dedicated to multiple users upvoting each other to gain CCP is a violation of Voat's rules, and could result in a site-wide account ban. The CCP requirements are not very high, so just spend some time talking with other users in non-anonymous, public subverses!

There are a number of different ways to view Voat. Most common is the Front page, to which https://www.voat.co links (the Voat logo at the top of every page also links to the front page). This page will show you posts from all the subverses you have subscribed to, unless you have not subscribed to any subverses, in which case the front page will show you the default subverses. Subscribing to only one subverse will replace all the default subverses with that one subverse subscribed to, so be sure to subscribe to every community you are interested in following!

/v/all is a view that can be accessed by clicking the "all" button above the Voat logo at the top of the page, or by adding "/v/all" to the main website URL. /v/all shows recent and active posts from all subverses on Voat, with the exception of any subverses you have blocked (subverses can be blocked by visiting the target subverse and clicking the "Block" button in the sidebar, or by clicking the "block subverse" button underneath a post from the target subverse when viewed from /v/all).

Hitting the "New" button within the same row as the Voat logo will shift the view of the front page or /v/all from "Hot", which shows posts based on time of posting and activity, to a running list of the most recently submitted posts. "Top", on the other hand, lists posts by the most upvotes, within a set period of time (24 hours, a month, forever, etc.).

You can also exclusively view content from a subverse without subscribing to anything by clicking on a link to a subverse and sorting by "Hot", "New" or "Top" as you please.

Night Mode

Night mode deserves its own section. Beside the "Log off" button is a light bulb -- it is highly recommended that you click it. This will toggle night mode for your account, and vastly improve your Voat experience, especially at night! This setting can also be changed within your User Settings (accessible by clicking on the gear symbol beside the light bulb).

Searching Voat

In the sidebar of every page is now a searchbar that makes use of a website (https://www.SearchVoat.co) created by a Voat user, which provides a very usable means of searching for submissions on Voat. Give it a try if you ever need to search for something!

That should be enough information to get the average user started. The markdown page is helpful for learning how to do fancy things with your comments. And again, be sure to check out the About and FAQ pages -- links can be found at the bottom of every page -- or if that fails, ask another user for help!

Upon some self-reflection I have to admit some faults. I have made two policy changes in the last few months that I did not communicate with Voat in advance.

These two changes are:

Adding NSFW flairs to posts that had the word nigger or kike in the title in @System subverses (often referred to as Default subs)

Changing the daily scaled value for allowed votes in a 24 hour period back to 10 from a mistaken setting of 1000 (which was used for testing purposes and got carried over to Voat by mistake).

On NSFW Titles:

Voat has always had an NSFW setting but it is inconsistently applied. It is my duty to respect this user setting while at the same time not censoring communication. As with most things on Voat, the grey area is large and often results in a subjective decision. With default subs, that decision is left to Voat, and more specifically to me.

The logic behind flairing NSFW titles in default subverses is this: If the title of a submission has the potential to get someone fired if a manager or co-worker saw it on your screen, then it is NSFW. Personally, I think it is straight forward for two reasons:

Titles of submissions can easily be phrased without the use of such wording so it's the submitters choice as how they word a title and also what subverse they post in.

Users who have NSFW turned off should have their setting honored. Many users toggle this setting between places (work vs. home).

BONUS: When not logged in, Voat displays default subs without NSFW content. As you know, Voat displays a lot of content that is visible to non-logged in users (as opposed to websites that require an account to access - which they do to inflate user account stats btw) and because of this we have to balance things out in default subverses.

On Daily Scaled Vote Setting:

The integrity of Voat is important to us all. Upon looking into manipulation on Voat, we discovered a massive hidden farm that was exploiting this setting, building up literally an army of accounts that can manipulate visibility of content via voting. Having a minimum setting of 1000 meant that a brand new non-participating account can upvote 1000 times per 24 hours, making the task of building a manipulation farm very easy.

While nothing we do is impervious to manipulation, we have found over the years that small requirements make big differences. An example of this is the required 10 CCP for making a submission. This requirement literally solved 90% of our spam problem overnight.

The unintended consequence of reverting this setting back to it's original value of 10 votes per day for low CCP accounts is the v/QRV subverse, as it is set to anon-only (Anon submissions and comments do not earn the user CCP). Many participate only in that subverse and as such, they have low CCP. The only remedy for this is to participate outside of that subverse and post insightful and respectful comments to non-anon subverses in order to "level up". Many will not like this, but consider two things: The setting was incorrect to begin with and Voat's integrity is a concern for all.

Here is the code we use to determine how many votes a user account is allowed per 24 hours:

In other words, if your account is 20 CCP or higher you are permitted a minimum maximum of 100 votes per 24 hour window (or half of your CCP, which ever is highest). If it is below 20 CCP, you are limited to 10. Points do matter, participation does matter.

The Conclusion

The conclusion is that Voat is no longer a start up website. Many depend on Voat now. We can no longer make policy decisions without communicating these changes in advance. As I've said before, Voat isn't mine, it's yours, and as such, policy decisions will be communicated in advance going forward.

Special thanks to @Rotteuxx for being honest enough to call me out on my mistake(s) and @PenSHITLORD for inquiring about the daily vote setting change which led me to write this post.

I will preface this by saying that only been here 6 mos, and only on one board of any kind for a year b4 (f169bbs), and have no idea how hard to code this would be. Also am thinking that you guys might not want this as would sort of get in the way of threaded nature of discussion, and encourage long sermons by OPs at the top of many threads that have to scroll past.

When I post a link to newspaper article or pic, would like to put a short explanation(beyond what is in title) that would appear at top of replies. Know I can do "discuss" instead of "share a link" and put link in there, but nice to have pic and domain name appear on index page. Every time I put this in reply, gets buried at end of replies and think not too many automatically use "sort by: Old" to look for such things. Just a rookie idea, don't take too much time to tell me about how terrible it is or impossible to make work, just ignore, but curious if anyone else has ever wanted such an option?

There's a ton of alt image hosting sites with one of the users' favorites being https://imgoat.com (which happens to be down at this moment). This seems like a good opportunity for Goats new and old to share their favorite image hosting site. I will compile the sites in the post message area as time goes on and leaving this stickied for a while too. Here's a few to get us started... Ready - set - GO!

The election, the potential fraud, the shooting, The media spin on Acosta and Trump, the attack on Tucker Carlson, it seems to be lighting up.

The Election: Democrats did much better than I thought they would. I was not a Red Wave guy, but I suspected things to say about the same as they were before the election. Now with all the nuttiness with the votes in Florida** the fraud** is obvious. Was the shooting supposed to take our attention away? Regardless of their is fraud or not, the optics are so poor and it seems so blatant, I am kinda speechless of the event.

The shooting came in right on time and I called that a few weeks ago. Did you read that 50 people at the bar were also at the Vegas shooting event? They are both country, not an impossible distance, and there are not many country bars on the west coast. I certainly know people in Northern California that travel to Vegas for entertainment. My problem is I don't believe in coincidences. 50 people at two mass shootings, that is crazy.

Acosta and the intern sure, did he smack her? No. But he did brush her arm away, was being his normal insistent self and it was not that big of a deal. It's the spin that is unbelievable. My own son argued with me that the event DID NOT HAPPEN. I watched it, it occurred. Even when I was willing to concede in the argument that it was overblown to downplay the event he, and many others, just went with the "we will have to agree do disagree" axiom. WTF. The media convinced half this nation based on their hatred for Trump to NOT SEE something clearly on tape. The concept of this being a psyop is mind blowing. An accidental situation based on a knee jerk reaction for the media to protect its own and attack Trump? Orchestrated? Right event at the right time? (again, I pause at labeling something a coincidence). The mind control here is top level.

Antifa attacking Tucker Carlson's house ???!!! That is crazy and the media is running cover for this. They have been screaming that Trumps rhetoric was going to lead to an attack on the press and here it the left's rhetoric and the governments refusal to arrest these agitators gave them license to behave this way. I hate to post things that suggest violence (I like to avoid the "everyone is a tough guy behind a keyboard" syndrome" but it seems to be that when they broke her door she would have been within her lawful right to open fire. A mob of unidentified people screaming at you and breaking your door could only give the impression that they mean you bodily harm. Even if you did not wait for the front door to crack from their force, I can't see how anyone could fault you for opening fire through the door and dropping as many threats as you can. It would not take much of a gun to have left a pile of bodies on the ground outside. They are very lucky people they did not get killed.

The only thing I see coming up next is an assassination. Be it one high profile figure or a "payback" attack for an excuse of hate speech or something I can't think of how else they are gonna top this. I see something coordinated, occurring simultaneously in at least 4 or 5 locations. Nobody will claim responsibility. The leftist hate mobs will rejoice on social media, it will be condoned, and mainstream media will explain to everyone why it was okay and necessary.

I think it's gonna happen soon and it's only gonna get worse. Good luck Voaters!

Most noticeable is the return of the searchbar in the side bar, which works through /u/SearchVoat's https://www.searchvoat.co, which has been a godsend for Voat for years. Now it can once again be accessed even more easily, from Voat itself!

Noticing this inspired me to check and see how many of the changes that have been undergoing testing on preview Voat for the past few weeks may have also been added. The answer is a lot of them!

The reply previewing feature has been updated, and this update also makes it so that preview works in browsers (like Pale Moon) where it previously did not.

Default username URLs now make use of /u/ instead of /user/, but /user/ will still work (just like /u/ worked while /user/ was the default). This might interfere with CSS so if you experience issues of any kind, consider adjusting the stylesheet of your subverse. More information here.

Mobile users will like this next one: appending ?nestlevel=X to the end of any Voat URL will automatically collapse all comments except those above the first X levels. So if you select X to be 2, any reply in a comment chain beyond the second will be automatically collapsed. Setting X to 1 will collapse all comments except for root comments (setting X to 0 also has this effect, I think). This will make browsing Voat in a mobile browser a little easier! And of course this can be used on desktop as well. More information here.

But most exciting of all: the titles of posts can now be editted within 10 minutes of posting! After ten minutes, only the text body of a post (if it is a discussion post) can be editted. Give it a try! More information here.

I’m an observational person by nature and Voat is a treasure chest for me. The other day (@Cynabuns is better with dates) I noticed a pattern of communication at Voat. Then, inspired by other Voat OC, I decided to do my own.

I call it The Voat Burger (mostly because it doesn’t look like a sandwich):

A few days later (again ask @Cynabuns) I got to even more thinking and this is where the insight hit me. I don’t eat many starchy carbs because they just aren’t that good for me. I usually get my burgers with a lettuce wrap.

If I log in and go to the Front page, then click on TOP, my account immediately switches to another person's account with O comments, submissions, etc. If I go back to the front page, it's my account again. Does this happen to anyone else? What's this mean?